Time flew by. A full week had passed since Mo Fan resolved to "put on the skin of a body cultivator."
This week, life in the servants' quarter was so peaceful it bordered on dull.
Mo Fan's daily routine had become extremely regular:
Each morning, he dragged his "mostly healed but still can't run on it" injured leg to wander the back mountain, directing Summon No. 001 to gather herbs—slacking off like an office worker on the clock.
At noon, he squatted against the wall with Old Lü and Da Hu, shoveling down coarse rice while listening to gossip about the "Outer Sect Grand Tournament."
In the evening, he returned to his room early, bolted the door, and began his "secret experiments."
On the surface, this was a servant who had survived disaster and was working hard to return to normal life.
But only Mo Fan knew how suffocating this tranquility felt.
Every night when all was quiet, he would gaze through the broken window lattice toward the distant main peak of the Azure Cloud Sect—that mountain piercing the clouds, perpetually wreathed in spiritual mist—and the desire to grow stronger drove him ever forward.
Over these past few days, through casual conversations and indirect inquiries, he had pieced together the fragmented memories in his mind into a more complete picture.
The servants' quarter where they lived, though technically part of Azure Cloud Sect, was really just the outer edge of the sect's "moat." The true core area of the main peak was still dozens of miles away.
For mortal orphans like A-Song, that mountain was heaven itself. For bottom-tier cultivators like the original Lu Xiaoqi—deemed worthless—that mountain was a homeland they could never return to.
Lu Xiaoqi had been here for four or five years, still stuck at the first level of Qi Condensation, having never even killed a proper Tier-1 Spirit Beast.
"This is reality..."
Mo Fan withdrew his gaze and looked around his crude mud hut, then at the experience bar on his retina—now at LV. 3, but stagnant from lack of resources.
"If I don't fight tooth and nail, I'll rot in the mud."
He turned and dragged out a basin he'd prepared earlier from under the bed—coarse river sand mixed with gravel, dug from the riverbank during the day.
Since he couldn't afford the "refined iron sand" required by the Iron Bone Art, this would have to do.
Since he couldn't afford "meridian-protecting medicinal baths," he'd just tough it out.
Mo Fan took a deep breath, stripped off his shirt, revealing his lean torso. With his [ HP: 80/80 ] at full capacity, he grabbed a handful of rough river sand, clenched his teeth, and began scrubbing it furiously against his skin along the meridian pathways described in the jade slip.
"Hssss—!"
The coarse grit tore through skin. Blood seeped out instantly.
This pain wasn't the sharp sting of a blade. It was a burning, grinding agony—like having your flesh sanded away layer by layer.
Ten minutes. Twenty minutes.
Only when Mo Fan was drenched in blood, cold sweat streaming down his face, nearly rolling on the ground in agony, did he finally stop. With trembling hands, he opened the System Panel.
[ Constitution: No change. ]
[ Defense: No change. ]
[ Skill "Iron Bone Art" Progress: 0%. ]
[ System Notice: Ineffective self-harm detected. Recommend stopping. ]
"Heh..."
Mo Fan slumped to the ground, staring at the blood-stained sand, and let out a cold, self-mocking laugh.
"'Literature is cheap, martial arts expensive.' The ancients didn't lie."
Without medicinal support for recovery, without spiritual energy to nourish the body, this kind of pure external damage couldn't achieve the "break and rebuild" effect. It was nothing but pointless torture.
This also made him fully recognize a reality: in this world where resources were monopolized, the poor trying to rise through orthodox methods was basically a pipe dream.
"If the proper path won't work, then... I'll take the wild path."
Mo Fan wasn't discouraged. He was a science student, and more importantly, a Necromancer. When conventional problem-solving hit a wall, it was time to look for "system exploits."
Fighting through the searing pain, he picked up the jade slip again, his gaze turning cold and sharp as a scalpel.
"Break it down."
"No matter what technique it is, the underlying logic is the same: External damage (stimulus) + Energy repair (absorption) = Physical growth (becoming stronger)."
Ordinary body cultivators used iron sand and fire toxins as the "source of destruction," and spiritual medicines as the "source of repair."
"I can't afford medicines, but I have a systematically quantified body. As long as my HP bar isn't empty, I won't die. And my body has already been transformed by death energy—my tolerance for energies harmful to the living is extremely high."
The repair side was solved—tank it with [ HP ], recover slowly over time.
So what about the destruction side?
He couldn't afford expensive "fire poison ant extract." River sand was too weak. He needed something free, abundant, and capable of producing sustained, deep stimulation to flesh.
Mo Fan's gaze pierced through the walls, as if seeing the bottomless depths of Abandoned Sword Cliff.
A repulsive creature surfaced in his mind.
[ Rotbone Ants ].
These were low-level insects that lived in the shallow mist zones at the bottom of the cliff. They weren't large, but their numbers were endless. What made them truly troublesome was the trace amounts of Corpse Poison in their saliva.
Once bitten, wounds would burn with pain and fester. Left untreated, the poison could even corrode bone. For ordinary cultivators, these were unlucky creatures to be avoided at all costs.
"Corpse Poison..."
But Mo Fan's eyes grew brighter and brighter. An almost crazy hypothesis took shape in his mind.
"Corpse Poison is toxic to the living—the culprit that destroys tissue."
"But who am I? I'm a Necromancer. I deal with corpses every day. My source of power is death energy itself."
"For me, couldn't this corrosive corpse poison be like... pepper water? Burning as hell, sure, but as long as I can digest it, wouldn't it be the best... tonic?"
Replace fire toxin with corpse poison. Replace spiritual energy with death energy.
It was like everyone else drinking expensive ginseng soup to nourish themselves, while Mo Fan decided to just chug industrial alcohol for the extra kick.
It sounded insane, but logically... it actually formed a closed loop.
"Whether it works or not, I'll find out by trying."
Once his thinking broke through, Mo Fan couldn't sit still for another second. The desire to grow stronger overwhelmed his fear of pain.
He quickly dressed, covering the bloody marks the sand had ground into his body, then grabbed all the equipment he could use.
"No. 001, come out."
With a ripple in space, the one-armed Summon No. 001 appeared shouldering that axe pilfered from the logging camp, standing in the cramped room like a loyal bodyguard. After several days of Mana nourishment, most of the cracks on its frame had healed.
"You too, No. 003."
Mo Fan patted his storage pouch.
The Shadow Leopard skeleton that had been hidden in the tree hollow for days—its spine barely held together with scrap bones—was released as well. Though it was still a "budget version" that could only run and couldn't fight, it was more than adequate as a mount.
The night was thick, the moon dark, the wind high.
Mo Fan donned the [ Shadow Leopard Cloak ], the hood concealing most of his face, and swung onto No. 003's back.
"Let's go. To the bottom of the cliff."
No. 003's sharp claws sank silently into the ground, carrying Mo Fan out through the window like a ghost, vanishing into the vast darkness.
"To stand tall before others, you must suffer in the shadows."